Customer Experience in 2019

March 29, 2019

Taking care of customers has always been considered to be a crucial aspect of your business, and it continues to be the same today. After all, they are the reason why businesses remain afloat and eventually flourish. But with so many competitors in the market, how will you surge ahead to make your place in the hearts and minds of your consumers? It is the delightful customer experiences you offer that will make the difference and help you remain the winner of the game. With time the traditional ways of customer retention, customer service and customer experience have become obsolete. Businesses need to be aware and embrace the latest technologies and trends to lure and retain customers. Let’s talk about how to compete.

Technology

Technologies have had a long transformative journey entering the lives of consumers as luxury and slowly moving towards being a necessary entity. Technologies have found a stable place in the lives of people because of the sheer convenience they offer. The advent of technology is credited for the rise of several communication channels via which consumers and service providers can candidly interact. In today’s age of innovation and technology, service providers or/and business persons need to develop an efficient customer-centric strategy to ensure they remain the first go-to-service-provider of their customers.

The Journey Of Your Customer – The growth of technology has given customers ample of options to contact you (read – all service providers). There are loads of devices via which customers can reach out to you such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Customers usually don’t come back once they face technical issues like high loading time of web pages. Also, it is imperative to understand the real reason why a customer has turned up to you and thereafter answer them accordingly. Customers land to your page with various intentions such as comparing product/service prices and to kill time. Always be generous but don’t go overboard explaining each of your services if you realize that the customer is there only to kill time. Therefore, you need to keep an eye on all the channels you are present on. Ensure a smooth transformation from one medium to another without minute discrepancy among devices like mobile, laptops, and desktop

Robotic Process Automation Trends – RPA is configuring computer software to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, triggering responses, manipulating data, and communicating with digital systems in practice. In RPA the work of human’s is carried out by robots which prove to be beneficial for the company. Apart from slashing manpower costs, RPA also manages to minimize human errors and automates instant replies to customer queries. This is an excellent tactic to address customer queries instantly with accurate information without human intervention.

Prioritize and Embrace Conversational AI – It always feels good to get answers to your questions on-the-dot and in a stress-free style. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is a stratagem adopted by companies of all sizes. Voice responses like Amazon’s Alexa and messaging with WeChat are remarkable AI’s that are credited for helping brands attain customer delight.

People + Process

An easy-to-implement plan should be worked out and executed to ensure customers enjoy their journey while interacting with you, irrespective of the channel; while focusing on one-on-one communication remains the most important thing when talking to customers.

Self-Help Customer Service Will Win – Customers in 2019 are cool, candid, smart and courageous. They prefer to find guide books, learn by themselves, and solve their problems independently. Offering them a self-help manual will be a prudent strategy to keep them enthusiastic about your brand.

Being Omni-channel is Compulsory – There’s no dearth of paths for customers to get in touch with you. However, you should bear in mind that the journey of no two pathways are alike. Hence, each path requires a different approach in order to make a customer’s journey smooth. As a business owner, you should take it as an opportunity to attract more and more customers by maturely designing unique and effective journey paths for your customers, across channels. Thoughtful implementation of Omni-channel strategies will keep your customers contented.

Focus on Human-to-Human – No matter how many technologies, robots or AI you implement when it comes down to serving customers, your agents are the ones who can really make the difference. Be sure to take care of your team and they will take care of your customers. And never forget that customer care is nothing more than a positive one-on-one interaction.

These were some of the strategies you can employ to ensure a delightful customer experience in 2019. Find out more about how to optimize the digital medium and utilize technology to grow your business here.